Apple Approached AdMob Before Google Gobbled Them Up?
Did Apple meet with mobile advertising company, AdMob before Google acquired them last week for $750 million? That's what "people familiar with the matter" told Bloomberg:
Buying AdMob would have allowed Apple to expand into online advertising, a strategy that Nokia Oyj is pursuing, [IDC analyst Karsten Weide] said. “If a lot of traffic goes through my devices, why can’t I become the middleman that serves ads against that inventory? AdMob would have allowed them to do that quickly.”
Clearly advertising isn't a core Apple business the way it is for Google, but then again with Google getting into so many of Apple's core businesses (smartphone OS with Android and now desktop OS with ChromeOS), Apple could be looking to give them a dose of their own expansion. Given that Apple recently filed a patent for an ad-supported version of Mac OS X (something Microsoft explored years ago for Windows), they could also be looking for alternate ways to subsidize the cost of their platforms going forward. Right now carriers like AT&T foot the advance for the iPhone (and theoretically might do the same for an iTablet or 3G-connected MacBook) but the more options to reduce up-front consumer costs, the better -- especially in the increasingly competitive landscape.
We've said before Apple should have snapped up Grand Central before it became Google Voice, is Cupertino growing slow to react, or is Google just hitting warp speed?
Editor-in-Chief of iMore, Executive Producer at Mobile Nations, co-host of Iterate and ZEN and TECH, cook, grappler, photon wrangler.
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Umm, I'm pretty sure you mean ChromeOS, and not CloudOS. Chrome is Google's, and Cloud is somebody else's (VMWare? Microsoft?)
Google is just too fast for anyone. They either are one of the two.
1.) They're complete geniuses and are able to see potential from something way before anyone else can
or
2.) Just filthy rich fools who will buy anything just to flaunt their money then later on, realize there's something to be had there, LOL.
I'm actually not sure as to which one they might be.
@iDavey
The two are not mutually exclusive in a single person, much less a large company.
Chances are Apple didn't want to pay what AdMob wanted.
Or that AdMob does not fit into Apple's plans involving its lock-the-OS-until-user-verifies-having-watched-the-ad patent, which the geek press covered a month or so back, but which appears to have finally made the mainstream press in the last 3 days. (NY Times: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/11/15/business/15digi.html Actual Patent Application at the USPTO: http://tinyurl.com/yzevy38 )
Or in due diligence Apple saw that what they do is pretty easy and can do it themselves...
Apple selling ads makes sense. While it can be theorized that the ads can be in OSX remember that the iPhone's OS is OSX. Now consider apps. Apps are simply mobile websites and folks have been selling ads on web sites for years. In app ads would generate revenue for the developer, it would generate ad revenue as middleman for Apple and it's easy for the ad sponsor to determine if their ad is suitable for a given app. Apps already segment the market by interest or need and that makes them ideal to target the message if your are the ad sponsor. And ad sponsored apps could lower your purchase price for an app. I have the free version of Twitterific, paid nothing for it and while I notice the ads they really don't get in the way of my user experience.
@TheReptile
I typically ignore ads as well, but we are the targets of Apple's patent. To continue your example, imagine an ad-supported Twitteriffic where you could not scroll your timeline until you have verified having seen the ad. The patent's "innovation" is not placing ads in OSX, it is in making the OS -- ANY OS -- instead of an individual application, responsible for the disabling of the device until the user has signaled having see the ad.
Unless there is a backlash to Apple placing that sort of intrusion in iPhone/Mac OS, that centralized device sort of advertiser control immediately becomes more valuable to an advertiser than any web-based third party solution, so perhaps Apple has planned something "grander" than AdMob.
@Dev:
There is also the possibility of that sort of advertising becoming so infuriating that people would avoid it all together, along with any product that embeds it and any advertiser that uses it.
The "Click Here to Skip this Ad" is irritating enough. Being forced to watch something is a non-starter.
Would Jobs actually unleash this on his phone, and try to buy AdMob as a platform?
If so, thank god for Google.
If not, maybe he wants that patent to prevent anyone else using it.
With free Apps supported by AdMob in the App store, I find it ammusing that Google has their fingers in Apple's pockets.
It is a bit scary that Google is sticking their fingers in almost every piece of pie on the table though. But they do seem quite liberal when it comes to letting people do what they want, which I see as a good thing.
@icebike
Agreed -- I would definitely be part of that backlash. Few things would make me immediately toss my iPhone for an Android or dumber phone, but at the very top of the list would be if my device purposely locked me out from time to time when I was trying to do something.
Hopefully, this is just a defensive patent, and not a sign of things to come on Apple platforms.